One final point. It is more likely that this ideational train will be fully operational and pulling on external images when we are tired and overwhelmed. Such a state is not uncommon when living in what several social observers have identified as the conditions of exhaustion (Newport, 2016; Stoycheva, 2022). We step on board the train in an anxious and fatigued condition. We soon find that the train is filled with passengers who match our anxiety and fatigue. They also hold an often-unacknowledged feeling of regret regarding their personal life as well as their collective life. Together, we create and maintain even more bizarre fictional accounts of the menacing world in which we now live and work. These accounts appear and are amplified in our dreams. It is from these often-challenging dreams that we can learn individually and collectively about not only the nature of the perils we face but also the potential pathways to a world that has successfully confronted these perils.
Across a Collateral Chasm
As we have explored dreams from many perspectives in this series of essays, it has become clear, at least to me, that dreams are a very special invention of the human psychic. Dreams are not only, as Sigmund Freud proposed, the royal road to the unconscious; they are also the precious pathway to another world—another reality from which we can gather great insights and guidance toward finding or constructing a viable pathway in our waking life.
Collateral Status
Specifically, we should consider our dreams, and more generally our hours of sleep, to be “collateral” to the world in which we live when awake. Our sleep/dream world operates by quite different principles than our waking world. As Freud himself first observed, dreams don’t obey the decorum of the “civilized” world and certainly mess around with all rules associated with an orderly and stable reality. In some civilizations, the collateral life of sleep and dreams has been considered just as important and just as real as the life we live when awake. As in the case of collateral organizations (Zand, 1974) where new ideas can be discussed and tested, the collateral life of sleep and dreams can provide an invaluable venue for exploration, testing and growth.
How, then, might a venue for exploration, testing and growth be established. First, there is the matter of acknowledging that communication can be engaged between these two worlds, and that a new, integrative reality can emerge from this communication. Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) suggests that we create an evolving sense of self from our interaction with other people. Our sense of self differs when interacting with each person we meet. Leslie Brothers (2001) moves even further in suggesting that we create a distinctive, new reality as we relate to one another. For Atwood and Stolorow (1979/1993) this amounts to an intersubjectivity, with our sense of self and reality being defined within a specific set of interpersonal relationships and social settings. I would propose that there is another form of intersubjectivity that exists when our dream/sleep world interacts with our awake world.
Intersubjectivity and Dialogue
Atwood and Stolorow suggest that there is no “real” objectivity in our waking world, because with intersubjectivity the observer of their world becomes the observed. For Atwood and Stolorow (1979/1993. P. 189) “human experience is always embedded in an irreducible engagement with others.” Furthermore, there is an “essential inseparability of the psychological investigator from the worlds of experience he investigates.” Most importantly, “every individual’s personal reality is subjectively and historically shaped . . . therefore no one’s personal reality is inherently more true or valid than another’s.” Each human being holds their own reality tightly in their head and heart; no one is “objective” or knowing of any fundamental principles of human behavior or the reality of the physical world and multiple societies in which we all live.
